How to help your child develop healthy relationships at school?

One of the most important aspects of school-life for children is developing friendships and positive relationships. Children cannot be expected to be friends with everyone they have to work with but are likely to feel much happier at school if they can develop some strong, lasting friendships and are able to cooperate with their peer group.

While many children will make friends and learn how to cooperate with their peers naturally, here are a few suggestions for things you can do at home to help:

1. Demonstrate appropriate behaviour: During the early years of child development, children learn social skills by copying the adults they see around them. It is therefore important for adults to model the behaviour they would like to see in their child and be aware of their reactions to everyday social situations.
2. Encouraging positivity: Encourage your child to be positive by discussing problems and talking about how to turn a situation around.
3. Shared interest: Give your child lots of opportunities to try different activities that will help them to find out what their interests are and build their confidence to try new things. Most friendships are based around some shared interests.
4. Start conversations to build confidence: Role playing opening sentences could help your child get conversations started.
5. Good manners: How to join in a conversation politely, without interrupting, entering a conversation that has already started, waiting for a pause then adding something relevant to the conversation, etc., it is important to model and teach your child when to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and how to greet adults and other children in different situations.

When I was a child, my sister and I would love making mud out of sand and pretend it was pancakes. The imagination it took to keep ourselves from being bored is now highly commendable in my opinion. At the time it was normal and we would not want to do anything else. Life was simple, and so was making friends. Proximity, culture, personality traits and core values were integral components in developing relationships and friendships back then. Every human connection has a starting point, and then several stages based on different models for example: Acquaintance, Build-up, Continuation, Deterioration and Ending.

Our children are living under different governing determinants of factors of developing relationships like peers, social media, constant change, environment, education and others.

I invite you attend the “Wellness Wednesday Workshop: How to help your child develop healthy relationships at school?” on Oct 31st , 8:00am to 9:30am, at the Sunmarke School Auditorium.

Let’s take a closer look at healthy and unhealthy friendships, attachment theory in practice, cross cultural communication awareness, interpretation of non-verbal communication, interpersonal and social skills, conflict resolution and more… To reserve your seat please click here.

Be well and see you soon.

Fatima Abdullah
School Counsellor
Sunmarke School